As some of you may already be aware, we have begun construction of a new forum as a rebirth of PHO and continuing on into future projects.
This forum is called Silph Co., and can be found by clicking the banner below. We are in the process of transferring some of our old resources, and the forum is open for posting. It will be sad to see PHO go, but we look forward to a bright future with Silph.
The forums here will be moved to an archive, and the url will redirect to the new site in the coming days/weeks.

News & UpdatesThis is the place to get the latest news and updates about PHO.

What about, instead of regular forum games, we have hacking games? Like small challenges and such? See who can do this and who can do that. It would be a gpod way for beginners to get involved and have fun.

As stated above, what do you want from this place? Personally, I understand if you want to keep it centered on ROM hacking, but for members like me who don't hack at all, there's nothing here.

I do like having sections where you can talk about random stuff and have fun instead of having everything centered around hacking.

But if the forum turns out like that, we're just going to have another Pokecommunity here. In Skeetendo Inc, we tried to keep the random discussion in IRC and not involve too much of it in the forums to keep things "clean".

Even though effort was put into it, we started to get more and more useless posts lately as more unnecessary members joined the forums. Since that's a hacking forum, having kids who are there for pokemon and nothing more takes down the quality of the posts.

Yeah, what I wanted to say here is that if this forum is going to be centered around rom hacking, then most messages should be related to it too. And if we want to have a chatting forum instead, then only a little bit of content could be based on rom hacking.

I like the latter option the most, but treating all kinds of posts as "Okay." would only lead into more and more pokemon fans showing up. Result: the forum will lose its meaning

My opinion is (and always has been) that we should have a forum where everyone is welcome and appreciated, so long as they know how to behave of course. And as such, it should try to have things that appeal to a lot of people, without losing sight of the hacking nature. What I'm saying is it shouldn't only focus on documentation, but it should focus on the finished product too (and the people who come here to play them).

People these days seem to forget that you don't have to be interested in making a hack to be an important member of the community. Documentation is great, and its nice to have for those that use it, but that isn't the only way you grow a community and its not how you have a community most people care about coming back to. The hacks themselves are what get people here and keep them around. Of course you want to help people learn how to hack if they want to, but they aren't the only users you will get and its silly to assume that they would be. You have to remember the normal people. You have to remember the ones that come here to play the games we make.

Sure, in the "real world" the programmers aren't the ones who deal with the customers. It doesn't (and generally can't) work that way in rom hacking. It never has and it probably never will... And I personally wouldn't want it to. Seeing people react and respond to (and hopefully enjoy) the hacks I make is one of the only reasons I keep doing it. I look for and watch "Let's play!" videos of my hacks and try to fix or improve things that most users dislike or say they wish it had. But anyway, like I say: If it wasn't for the community nature of it, and the interaction with players and other users, I would have gotten bored with hacking years ago -- probably before Fire Red was even released.

If people want an area that is for pure documentation (like some people on Skeetendo wanted), make a wiki or something. That's what Wikis were made for. But this is a forum, where people hang out and talk and discuss things. That is the entire reason for forums to exist. To complain about "idle chit chat" on a web forum makes as much sense as complaining about people who get a YouTube account and just post videos with it, or who get a Facebook and just use it for social networking.

A lot of people (mostly those from Celedon Mansion) won't remember that in the past forum, Off-topic discussions were the problem. That was the only activity on the site. It was all games and Daily Chit chat. The Daily Chit chat thread was actually locked for a period, but it was no good. That was when the forum was taken off the web. When the new forum was being contemplated, one of the main points LaZ wanted was that he wanted a forum of hackers, not all this Off-topic and forum games. Activity is slowing a bit, yes, but I think we need to go more into helping people remember those great childhoods of enslaving pokemon and whoopin' on youngsters with them. I personally think, no more Off-topic and focus more on content.

It's hard to start fresh, especially with a history like ours. The offtopic section here was meant for any discussion, including forum games. People just don't seem to be interested this time around. I feel that with affiliation and commitment to contribution this forum can be a success. But it is by no means a one man job. It's a community effort.

Also, just to make sure I didn't come across the wrong way earlier in my long rambling post:

1. Documentation and Tutorials are awesome and necessary.
2. Posting hacks (of any game, not just Pokemon) is as important or more important than documentation, because it makes people want to come here in order to follow their development and play them when they are available.
3. I don't want to get rid of off-topic, but I don't want the entire forum to be off-topic either. I just meant that it can be a nice thing to have when kept in its place and it shouldn't be written off completely.

content would be nice if we had a reward to make it. If we're just going to be a "dump all your **** here" forum, we already have romhacking.net for that and frankly just close everything down we're not going anywhere.

The point is to provide an alternative community for hacking. One that makes it fun. So what I think should happen is that we get a bit "off topic" for the sake of not feeling too uptight (I'm well aware that we need to focus on hacking, but a little more would help ease up the atmosphere) and though we don't want 40 forums about not rom-hacking like last time we should separate the programming from the design. We have a whole forum to work with, rather than one section like Pokécommunity. And we're a general ROM hacking forum at that, so having a lot of different kinds of sections (as opposed to just a lot of sections) is at least part of our goal.

I think that there should be one or two more off-topic sections (again, I don't have any details) and a section where people can avoid all the programming and documentation and just create storylines, artwork, etc. I find that what drives a lot of people away from ROM Hacking is that they think it's all programming and documentation, where it's actually more creativity than anything. So focusing on the "creativity" would be more productive than just clumping them in one huge mess as it is right now.

and this next point is important

pia, you said "we're just a place to dump all your info" when I said about "making this fun". (granted, you were tired and I was being a ***** but still)

Well, if that's the case, then, even objectively, we won't be going anywhere. We're not being paid in money - we're being paid in the form of a lifetime of memories and experiences. If we just need to dump our hacks, and not focused about the experience of making the hacks, well, we already have a general ROM hacking site for that. We need to make our experience unique. Like, so different that we could theoretically trademark the experience, if it came down to that. That's how we attract members. We need to have a reason to exist, rather than just some kid's dreams of being the admin of a successful forum. I mean, the dream is why we're here, but the reason is why we stay.

What if we do a series of hacking related contests that don't have to be related to our "serious" hacks.

For example, a 24-hour mini-hack contest. You come up with the best mini-hack of some game that you can in 24 hours. (we could hold things like this whenever we felt like I guess.) Then we can play them and vote on a winner in different categories. If you're good with graphics but not other things like scripting, you could try to come up with a graphic overhaul as your entry for example. Just a way to have some fun and show off some of your strengths in ways that might not make sense in a "normal" hack.

Another thing we could do is a hack-of-the-month or other contest similar to Pokecommunity, although we'd need to come up with a way to make ours unique.